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6 Terabyte Hard Drive Round-Up: WD Red, WD Green and Seagate Enterprise 6TB
MojoKid writes The hard drive market has become a lot less sexy in the past few years thanks to SSDs. What we used to consider "fast" for a hard drive is relatively slow compared to even the cheapest of today's solid state drives. But there are two areas where hard drives still rule the roost, and that's overall capacity and cost per gigabyte. Since most of us still need a hard drive for bulk storage, the question naturally becomes, "how big of a drive do you need?" For a while, 4TB drives were the top end of what was available in the market but recently Seagate, HGST, and Western Digital announced breakthroughs in areal density and other technologies, that enabled the advent of the 6 Terabyte hard drive. This round-up looks at three offerings in the market currently, with a WD Red 6TB drive, WD Green and a Seagate 6TB Enterprise class model. Though the WD drives only sport a 5400RPM spindle speed, due to their increased areal density of 1TB platters, they're still able to put up respectable performance. Though the Seagate Enterprise Capacity 6TB (also known as the Constellation ES series) drive offers the best performance at 7200 RPM, it comes at nearly a $200 price premium. Still, at anywhere from .04 to .07 per GiB, you can't beat the bulk storage value of these new high capacity 6TB HDDs.
6TB isn't ready for the serious archives, who, by my own subjective definition, only purchases drives warranted for 5 years. It's still $160 or so for a 4TB like that.
TL;DR: Once you go WD Black you never go back.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Fastest: Seagate.
Best Warranty: Seagate.
Best Cache: WD Red....or the Seagate...the article conflicts between the first two pages.
Cheapest: WD Green.
Seagate notables: Full drive encryption available at a firmware level. AF and Legacy disks are separate models.
WD Red notables: 5400RPM spindle speed.
WD Green notables: None - nothing distinguishable from the Red drive, except a shorter warranty.
Sandra Benchmark results:
Seagate: 167W/168R.
WD Red: 138W/138R.
WD Green: 133W/133R.
Atto results are shown on a messy graph with no clear numbers, but Seagate wins that benchmark as well (albeit with a closer delta).
HD Tune Pro results basically reflect the transfer rates from above. Seek times for the Seagate are 11ms for both write and read, with the WD Red having a 16/17 set of scores and the WD Green being less than an integer higher. Burst rates are again better on the Seagate (276R/304W), with the WD Green being 217/220 and the Red being 217/218.
Crystal mark, basically the same numbers.
Futuremark, prettier graphs with wonderful titles like "video editing" and "importing pictures", with the results a closer race, each drive having its own task at which it wins (even the green). Not much different from the 3TB numbers, and not that much different from each other.
There were no mentions of reliability metrics; presumably none of the disks failed during benchmarking. Consult your usual biases and experience regarding which drive is likely to fail or not - this was strictly a benchmark review, and shockingly, the enterprise-grade drive with the highest rotational speed and biggest cache that costs the most money got the best score.
Replace bay 1 with a SATA board that can hold 4 SSD drive cards. It's what I did. OS and cache in bay one and 3 bays for 3 6TB drives. works great.
http://www.amazon.com/SATA-Dua...
Dual port version. I found a 4 port version and have it stuffed with 4 128gb SSD drives. works great.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Having experienced SSD failures.. NO you cant read from them. SSD drives do a catastrophic failure, you do not get a chance to read from them before full failure, they just do a complete fail and all data is gone forever.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Are the Red drives designed to be paired or run in RAID arrays specifically, as opposed to the Green line that is made for power savings?
Pretty much yes. The Red have better vibration tolerance, and the firmware is tweaked to fit a NAS workload better. For example, a Green will park the head as quickly as it can which for always-on machines can lead to a Green disk reaching its "Load/Unload Cycle" tolerance in months and die prematurely. The Red will not do this.
There's also a difference in how they handle unreadable sectors and such errors which makes the Red play nicer with hardware RAID controllers. An unrecoverable read error in a Green can cause the whole array to go down.
The main difference is the WD RED drives will error out quickly from an unrecoverable read error where as a typical desktop drive will retry the read, up to a minute, yes, a minute worth of retries which will confuse most RAID controllers into thinking the drive is bad (i.e. gone offline) and forcing an array rebuild. The idea being if you're not running RAID, it is okay to go through heroic efforts trying to trace difference paths over the track to get one good read out of the data before marking the sector bad.
Of course, if you're running RAID, the best thing is to fail the read quickly and rebuild the sector from parity.